91 - 100 of 108 results for: FRENCH

This course examines the Gothic as a both a narrative subgenre and an aesthetic mode, since its 18th century invention. Starting with different narrative genres of Gothic expression such as the Gothic novel, the ghost tale, and the fantastic tale by writers such as Walpole, Radcliffe, Sade, Poe, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, the course goes on to ask how the Gothic sensibility permeates a wide range of 19th century cultural phenomena that explore the dark side of Enlightenment, from Romantic poetry and art to melodrama, feuilleton novels, popular spectacles like the wax museum and the morgue. If time permits, we will also ask how the Gothic is updated into our present in popular novels and cinema. Critical readings will examine both the psychology of the Gothic sensibility and its social context, and might be drawn from theorists such as Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Zizek.

This course will explore the relationship between history, ecological evolution and mass killing in the age of humanly caused species extinction. It will explore the universalization of the notion of the Jewish Holocaust, its use to integrate into genocide studies the Native American "spiritual" holocaust, the Japanese nuclear holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, and the ethical dilemmas posed by the ideas of biotic, animal and ecological holocausts. Anthropology and history of genocides and extinctions as well as posthumanist, multispecies theories will provide theoretical frames for the course.

This course explores how Paris, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, became the political, cultural, and artistic capital of the modern world. It considers how the city has both shaped and been shaped by the tumultuous events of modern history- class conflict, industrialization, imperialism, war, and occupation. It will also explore why Paris became the major world destination for intellectuals, artists and writers. Sources will include films, paintings, architecture, novels, travel journals, and memoirs.

The term ¿postsecularism¿ refers to various theories and approaches regarding the revival of religion in the present, as well as current reevaluations of the relationship between faith and reason in knowledge building. When thinking about a postsecular humanities, the course would follow scholars that are usually associated with this trend (like Agamben, Badiou, Derrida, Habermas), on the one hand, and discuss Braidotti's ideas of a new vitalism, Chakrabarty's postcolonial postsecularism, and Harvey's new animism, on the other. The course will examine the way interactions and collisions among various worldviews can provoke the rethinking of key ideas of our times: what it means to be secular, religious, a citizen, a hybrid, an indigenous, a non-human.

Beginning with the account of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in Plato's Republic, we will read definitions and defenses of poetry by authors such as Cicero, Horace, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Sidney, Shelley, and Pound, among others. While we will try to historicize these authors' defenses as much as possible, we will also read them from the perspective of contemporary efforts to defend literature and the humanities. Topics of central concern will be the connection between poetry and ethics, the conflict between poetry and the professions of business, law, and medicine, poetry's place in the university, the political role of the poet, questions of poetic language and form, and the relevance of defenses of poetry to literary theory.

This course explores the central place Africa holds in prose writing emerging during early and modern periods of globalization across the Atlantic, including the middle passage, exploration and colonialism, black internationalism, decolonization, immigration, and diasporic return. We will begin with Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789), a touchstone for the Atlantic prose tradition, and study how writers crossing the Atlantic have continued to depict Africa in later centuries: to dramatize scenes of departure and arrival in stories of self-making or new citizenship, to evoke histories of racial unity or examine psychic and social fragmentation, to imagine new national communities or question their norms and borders. Our readings will be selected from English, French, Portuguese and Spanish-language traditions. And we will pay close attention to genres of prose fiction (Conrad, Condé, Olinto), epic and prose poetry (Césaire, Walcott), theoretical reflection (Gilroy, Glissant, Mudimbe, Benitez-Rojo), and literary autobiography (Barack Obama, Saidiya Hartman).

This course explores the emergence of Francophone cinema and literature from North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco) in the post-independence era: aesthetics, language metissage and hybridization, ethnic interactions, gender relations, collective imagination and collective memory, nationalism, popular culture, religion, urbanism, post-colonialism, migration, and the Arab Spring will be covered. Special attention will be given to Moroccan cinema, and to the notions of francophone/maghrebi/"beur"/diasporic cinema and literature. Readings from Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Kateb Yacine, Albert Camus, Reda Bensmaia, Assia Djebar, Colette Fellous, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Michel de Certeau, Benjamin Stora, Lucette Valensi, Abdelwahab Meddeb. Movies include Viva Laldjérie, Rome plutot que vous, Les Sabots en or, Les Silence des Palais, Halfaouine, Satin Rouge, Le Chant des Mariées, and Mort à Vendre. Taught in French. Films in French and Arabic with English subtitles.

On January 7th and 9th, 2015, two Islamic terrorist attacks claimed 17 deaths in the heart of Paris. On January 11th, more than 4 million people marched to uphold France's «Republican values» and freedom of expression. How can we understand the unfathomable? Can the social sciences help us understand the context, causes and consequences of these events for France's model of secular democracy? Materials include newsreels, films, novels (Houellebecq), and essays (Fassin, Morin, Badiou, Zemmour, Finkielkraut). Readings in English and French. Discussion in English.

What does it mean to say the personal is the political, or, in the case of Arendt, that the personal is not political, especially if you are woman? This course explores how De Beauvoir, Arendt, and Caverero contend with this question and how all three of them think, each in her own way, outside the box of philosophy, of political science, of ethics, and of feminism. Particular attention will be given to the role of art in directing social change and personal transformation, and to the enduring relevance of these women's thought today. Texts include The Second Sex, The Ethics of Ambiguity, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, Stately Bodies, and Relating Narratives.